Link: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/owners-mourn-spoiled-food-after-firmware-update-bricks-samsung-smart-fridges/

Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.

Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.

I have a PhD in IoT technology uses (mostly medical/clinical monitoring applications). My appliances do not have firmware to update. Don't buy that shit, it's stupid.

I can't play Orcs Must Die Unleashed because they turned off support even thought it was a perfectly good single player, AND NOW I CAN'T EVEN HAVE A FRIDGE THAT'S TWO YEARS OLD?!

"No WiFi" was a hard requirement for my induction range. Surprisingly hard to find.

You'd be surprised what kinds of things have firmware (although maybe not, if you work in IoT). A normal dumb fridge, a normal dumb dishwasher, most ovens, and definitely microwaves will have firmware. Even if they have no interface to update it. In some cases, the firmware was written using a chip programmer before the chip was soldered in. But there's still firmware. Any appliance with a clock will have it, because otherwise, you have to implement a clock in a CPLD or discrete logic gates or something. A microcontroller is just cheaper.

Right, but that's not firmware to update, which I interpreted as the differentiating factor.

If you think that is bad:

In 2020, Nature Medicine reported the story of Australian woman Rita Leggett, who’d received an experimental brain implant to treat her epilepsy. Implanted as part of a clinical trial, the device worked for Leggett: she stopped having seizures. However, mid-way through the trial, NeuroVista, the company that made the device, folded after investors became nervous about providing financial backing to such invasive technology.

Because the company was no longer operating, there was no means of monitoring the device. It was, quite literally, dead in Leggett’s head (well, not quite – the battery was meant to last three years). Her husband offered to buy the device from NeuroVista but was refused because of its proprietary components. Her only option was to have the device removed or ‘explanted’.

https://blog.kowatek.com/2024/05/04/brain-implants-are-becoming-obsolete-like-old-phones-what-happens-next/

Seriously? That's bananas

Why the fuck would a fridge need to be ‘smart’?

Like what’s the reasoning?

A boring dystopia.

it could judge you when you throw away those vegetables you never processed

Low level stuff is it can alert the user if the fridge or freezer door is open. Advanced features would be like being able to see inside your fridge remotely so you dont have to go to check what you need to buy at the grocery store.

Then you get to superfluous functions like displaying family photos, online buying of stuff like filters, logging what you have in the fridge and recommend dishes to make.

This is literally a black mirror episode. Stop helping these psychopaths build a world only they control.

Yeah the one I got had Wi-Fi, I should have known better

This is unrelated?

To corporate software decisions negatively impacting people's lives?

This very much was the point. OTA updates are a fucking robot idea for anything that can burn down a house, crash a car, or keep important things safe (like arthritis or immune therapy drugs that need to be kept cold).

And this is why the only Samsung products I have are RAM and SSDs.

And the SSDs are backed up daily.

Samsung should not have gotten into appliances. They seem to be singularly terrible in that field. No-one else comes even close to their level of incompetence.

They thought, if we can make phones... Why the fuck not a dishwasher??

Fuck around and Bosch out

And none of those functions should affect the basic function of keeping the interior cool in a good practice scenario following a DFMEA. That function should be in a separate layer that should not be affected by any faulty firmware

Data collection to use to sell you more of what you buy, determine what you would buy, what makes you buy things

What "smart" functions does a range have?

It let's you control it with your phone, gives you alerts, it's stupid, none of this is necessary.

"Convenience"

Samsung is awful at software. Samsung phones for some reason insist on replacing Google or even basic Android apps with their own worse versions.

That wasn't a software decision, though. It was a hardware one.

We recently had to buy a new washer/dryer. Every single set we looked at had wifi connectivity as a feature, so we did end up buying a set with that, but they will never see the light of my WAN.

I just mentioned elsewhere in this post that I had to buy a new washer/dryer set. Guess what brand I was getting rid of? They came with the house and I was on my 5th or 6th repair of the fucking dryer before I said fuck this, we are selling these before they become paperweights and getting something made by a competent appliance company.

lmao. this happened like two days before one of korea's major holidays.

Years ago I had to bring 10 tons of gravel to a work site using a wheelbarrow and a shovel. By the end of it my ability to load the wheelbarrow accurately and unload it efficiently was massively improved.

I was the firmware. I got an update.

It lets you automatically join foreign botnets!

If you are in Canada, look into Huebsch, which is the Canadian rebadge of Speed Queen.

And Speed Queen is known to make washers and dryers that last for decades without significant repairs so long as they’re used properly. Plus, IIRC they keep parts for any one model for a minimum of 25 years, and have been known to still have parts for machines more than 75 years old.

LG has entered the chat.

LG products are decent. The first washer+dryer set we had lasted 14 years with only a few minor error codes towards the end, which were trivial to research, fix, and clear on our own. Our current LG set has been running error free for 6 years now, and we honestly expect another decade of use, at minimum. Sure, some limitations are annoying - no tumble config allows me to lower the temp for longer and gentler drying. But it all works well.

Of course, our next set will be Huebsch, which is the Canadian re-badge of Speed Queen. We didn’t get this make because we only found out about this re-badging earlier this year. We had considered importing actual Speed Queen appliances (6 years ago), but went with our current set when we realized that the import costs alone would be gratuitous, and the warranty wouldn’t be applicable outside of America.

How long did it take you to do? I can't fathom how much work that must've taken

We are lucky to have moved to Germany. When building out our kitchen almost no appliances had "smart" tech features. We just bought slightly upgraded defaults from the kitchen designer and they're big standard devices. It's wonderful and normal.

Well it was maybe 200 loads or so, the pile wasn't super far.from the site... We lifted and redid the foundation of a small log cabin near a lake, too close to the lake and it had started to sink. So basically we lifted the cottage, removed the old floor, and we installed cinder blocks and gravel under the walls before putting humidity barriers and reinstalling a new floor.

The gravel was delivered in the driveway, and I had to wheel the wheelbarrow around the cottage to the entrance of the worksite to empty it in the empty space under the floor, then I would spread it where the cinder blocks go, and then gradually after everything was laid properly, we lowered the Jacks very slowly until the bottom logs of the log cabin rested on a steel angle resting on the cinder blocks.

The whole thing basically took the whole summer but most of it I was doing by myself, including redoing the new plywood floor afterwards...

This shit takes me back, omg... Here's an image for fun